There are many occasions where a worker needs to contact a co-worker or other person who has the best skill set or knowledge to assist that worker. Determining the contact target who has the “best” skill set or knowledge to assist the worker can depend on many factors including the target's: recorded skill set, authority, availability, location, language skills, priority, etc.
A general solution to this problem is to provide a list of people of the workplace that is stored in a database with each person's particular skill set or knowledge profile recorded in the database, whereupon a worker that requests specific information or other assistance can submit this to a server of the database to search for the target contact that is best suited to provide that assistance. In one solution, connecting to a target contact person with the best skill set match is mediated manually by a central dispatch service that can search the database for people with the required skills or capabilities, and then calling these people to see if they are available to the worker requesting the assistance, which may require much time and several calls to finally provide the desired result, if ever. Another solution is to provide an accessible database with a search function so that a person seeking another with a particular skill set or knowledge profile can look up these skills in the database to find the correct person, whereupon the requesting person can then contact this person on their own. In either case, there is additional manual processing and/or messaging that is required, which is time and labor intensive.
Accordingly, there is a need for a technique to automatically connect a requestor by voice to a best-determined target contact. It would also be of benefit to automatically provide an ordered list of alternate target voice connections if a connection cannot be made to the best target for whatever reason. It would be of further benefit, if the voice communication could be made without using an external telephone system.
Skilled artisans will appreciate that elements in the figures are illustrated for simplicity and clarity and have not necessarily been drawn to scale. For example, the dimensions of some of the elements in the figures may be exaggerated relative to other elements to help to improve understanding of embodiments of the present invention.
The apparatus and method components have been represented where appropriate by conventional symbols in the drawings, showing only those specific details that are pertinent to understanding the embodiments of the present invention so as not to obscure the disclosure with details that will be readily apparent to those of ordinary skill in the art having the benefit of the description herein.